Tag Archive for: DFAT

An inflection point for Australian intelligence: Revisiting the 2004 Flood Report

The 2003 Iraq war, and more particularly intelligence failure in relation to Iraqi WMD, led to a broad-ranging inquiry into Australian intelligence conducted by Philip Flood AO. Flood’s July 2004 report has proven an inflection point between the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC) of the immediate post–Cold War period and today’s National Intelligence Community (NIC).

Flood laid out an ambitious vision for Australian intelligence and forcefully advocated for sovereign intelligence capability. The scope of his review extended beyond more than ‘recent intelligence lessons’ – that is, Iraq’s WMD, the 2002 Bali bombings and the unrest that led to 2003’s Regional Assistance Mission Solomon Islands – to the effectiveness of oversight and accountability within the AIC (including priority setting), ‘division of labour’ between AIC agencies and their communications with each other, maintenance of contestability in intelligence assessments, and adequacy of resourcing (especially for the Office of National Assessments – ONA).

It was in addressing these matters that Flood laid the foundation for the future NIC, upon which would be constructed the reforms instituted by the L’Estrange-Merchant review of 2017.

Importantly, Flood’s recommendations significantly enhanced ONA’s capabilities—not just analytical resources but also the resources (and tasking) needed to address the more effective coordination and evaluation of foreign intelligence across the AIC. This was a critical step towards the more structured and institutionalised (if sometimes bureaucratic) NIC of 2023 and an enhanced community leadership role for, ultimately, ONI.

In addition, the Flood Report identified issues that remain pertinent and challenging today – including the vexed issue of the public presentation of intelligence for policy purposes, the central importance of the intelligence community’s people (including training, career management, recruitment and language proficiency), intelligence distribution (including avoiding overloading time-poor customers), the need to maximise collaborative opportunities between agencies, and how best to leverage intelligence relationships (including broadening relations beyond traditional allied partners).

Tag Archive for: DFAT

How Australia is advancing gender equality in the Indo-Pacific

Women’s rights and protections are regressing on the international stage, from the Taliban’s erasure of women from public life to US President Donald Trump’s misogynistic rhetoric and decision to suspend USAID.

Against this backdrop, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has launched its International Gender Equality Strategy. This strategy aims to deepen its partnerships in the Indo Pacific region, with a focus on gender responsive humanitarian and climate aid.

It is led by the notion that gender equality is the key to unlocking economic productivity, poverty reduction, climate action and wellbeing. Its inextricable link to policy outcomes calls for a stronger plan for delivery.

The strategy centres on five priorities:

—Working to end sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and protecting reproductive rights;

—Pursuing gender responsive peace and security efforts;

—Delivering gender equitable climate action and humanitarian assistance;

—Promoting economic equality and inclusive trade; and

—Supporting locally led women’s leadership strategies.

Under its first priority, the strategy estimates the global annual cost of SGBV as US$1.5 trillion. To integrate SGBV protection and international engagement, Australia intends to invest in response services as well as agencies for sexual and reproductive health and rights. The strategy also outlines Pacific partnerships for cervical cancer screening and treatment.

Notably, Australia will hold nations accountable for violating international laws protecting women, such as the action brought against Afghanistan for violating the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women under the Taliban’s governance. In a welcome development, the strategy also advocates for working with boys and men to change perceptions and reduce incidents of SGBV.

The second priority will be guided by Australia’s second National Action Plan on Women Peace and Security (WPS). This priority focuses on addressing gendered aspects of security and supporting women’s participation in peace processes, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. It includes encouraging women’s mediator networks in the Pacific and working with partners to strengthen legislation designed to prevent gendered crimes.

Under this priority, the strategy also aims to confront new challenges under the WPS agenda. DFAT’s document highlights the increased risk of manipulation, online radicalisation and gender bias caused by a weakening distinction between online and offline worlds. The strategy aims to address these issues by sponsoring women’s participation and training in these spaces, while working to identify further opportunities and solutions.

Priority three highlights the need for equity in climate action and humanitarian responses. DFAT’s 2023 International Development Policy mandated that all investments over $3 million must include a gender equality objective. The strategy’s third priority reinforces the need to consider gender-specific approaches to development and assistance, while outlining the importance of working with diverse Indo-Pacific groups on adaptation and resilience.

The strategy aims to ensure trade benefits flow to all people through priority four, promoting women’s economic equality and inclusive trade. Unpaid care responsibilities exclude 708 million women are excluded from the labour force. Australia is supporting workplace reform and financial inclusion, targeting key indicators of economic equality. The need to reorient the norms and perceptions of women in the economy, however, is not addressed in this strategy.

The strategy highlights that women’s rights movements are the ‘most effective drivers of lasting change’. This motivates its fifth priority: to increase women’s leadership through supporting local women’s rights organisations. The strategy outlines methods such as funding education, professional development and amplifying underrepresented voices. Apart from Pacific Women Lead, details of DFAT’s specific partnerships are excluded. This lack of detail weakens the overall priority.

Five principles underpin DFAT’s practical approach. The first two are supporting local leadership and implementing outcome-based reforms. The third concept accounts for potential resistance against gender equality measures and highlights a commitment to avoiding unintended negative consequences. To do so, DFAT will bolster safeguarding mechanisms, including through reporting and accountability measures, and maintain a zero-tolerance approach.

DFAT’s fourth principle is to pursue both targeted and mainstream strategies. This twin-track approach will ensure that gender-specific issues are addressed, while also incorporating gender into general policies and activities. Under the final principle, DFAT commits to using high-quality evidence-based approaches to create effective responses. It will incorporate individual experiences to evaluate and revise programs.

Accountability on these priorities will be measured by existing mechanisms, namely official development assistance summaries, the Australian Development Cooperation report and the AusDevPortal. The strategy builds on this by establishing thematic evaluations of gender equality initiatives.

In some areas, the document lacks analysis and detail in its reforms. These include the tenuous links between promoting women’s economic equality and establishing policies, as well as a lack of details on how Australia will support local leadership organisations.

Despite this, the International Gender Equality Strategy shows that Australia is pursuing an inclusive liberal democracy in an age where increasingly illiberal policies are gaining traction. The strategy reaffirms ‘the centrality of Australia’s commitment to gender equality’ and provides a framework for advancing the rights and perspectives of women on the global stage.

Defence’s role in Australia’s new international development policy

The government’s new international development policy, released last week, has some interesting implications for defence. In particular, it completes the process of aligning messaging across the different arms of statecraft on their important and complementary roles in a difficult and complex world.

The policy’s aim is ‘a peaceful, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific’. This frames development objectives along similar lines to the defence strategic review. Like the DSR, the development policy identifies Australia’s challenging strategic circumstances, including climate change, global economic uncertainty and geostrategic competition.

Given that 22 of Australia’s 26 nearest neighbours are developing countries, and many are fragile, an effective development program is key to building regional resilience. Minister for International Development and the Pacific Pat Conroy introduced the policy saying that ‘the success of Australia’s region is also our success’ and that positive development outcomes are ‘firmly in Australia’s national interest’. This message to Australia’s neighbours is equally relevant for defence diplomacy.

The development program is presented as a crucial mechanism at the heart of Australia’s response to an uncertain world. As Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong puts it, ’development underpins stability’. The policy explains that if Australians want to live in a predictable world, we have to lift people out of poverty through sustainable development.

This puts defence and development in the same frame as contributors to national goals of regional stability, prosperity and predictability.

The policy explicitly takes a whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach, using similar wording to the DSR about ‘all elements of national power’. Speaking at the launch, Wong said that in light of ‘the most challenging strategic circumstances in many generations … our nation has to deploy all of our national power—all tools of statecraft—to help shape the region we want.’

This brings a range of departments and agencies into a conversation about how they can contribute to international objectives. For example, the policy includes a case study of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility program to illustrate ‘how strong policy coherence across different tools of statecraft can deliver benefits for both Australia and our region’.

The policy stresses the importance of these different elements working together and commits to improving the integration of development with other tools of statecraft, including through ‘whole-of-government governance structures’.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is recognised as playing the role of lead agency on implementing official development assistance, wherever it’s delivered. This means that the DFAT reporting requirements set out in the policy’s performance and delivery framework will apply to other parts of government that manage development assistance programs.

The heavy lifting in the policy will be done by country-level development partnership plans led by Australian overseas missions. This provides an opportunity for them to incorporate a whole-of-government perspective, given that each mission is a microcosm of myriad agencies and departments.

A salient feature of the new policy is its embedding of important themes across the whole development program.

Climate change is identified as a development priority and cross-cutting theme. Climate risk must be considered in all bilateral and regional development partnership plans. And, from next year, at least 50% of all new investments over $3 million must have a climate change objective, with a goal of reaching 80% in 2028–29. According to DFAT, the proportion of projects with climate change objectives is currently around 25%.

Gender equality—along with disability equity—is a ‘core issue for action’. Already there’s a target for 80% of all overseas development investment to address gender equality effectively. Now all new investments over $3 million must include gender equality objectives.

It is an approach that pushes change within the department—everyone will be responsible for meeting those climate and gender equality targets. There’s anecdotal evidence that it is already having an effect, with reports of controlled panic among staff who will now have to identify a climate focus in their projects.

Other notable elements include the commitments to create a civil-society partnerships fund to counter the shrinking of civil space in many parts of the world, to embed First Nations Australians’ perspectives in the development program, to create a cadre of senior responsible officers at posts, and to create a new development portal to increase accessibility and transparency of information on the development program.

So, what comes next?

One of the commitments in the policy is to create a whole-of-government humanitarian policy, which should put flesh on the bones of how to ensure an adaptable, responsive and effective framework to address humanitarian need and build resilience. The process is expected to commence in September across the whole of government, and defence should be strongly involved.

Work will also continue on a new international gender equality strategy that will apply across government.

Overall, the policy makes a bold statement. Like the DSR, it unapologetically presents the case to Australians that a deteriorating strategic environment will require greater investment in Australia’s international tools.

The policy deserves to be read widely—including by those who work on Australia’s defence—to consider how multiple elements of statecraft can contribute to security and stability.

Australian diplomacy needs more women of colour

Women of colour continue to be systemically under-represented in Australian diplomacy. While a number of prominent Australian diplomatic positions are occupied by women of colour—including minister for foreign affairs, held by Penny Wong, who has Malaysian–Chinese heritage; and high commissioner to New Zealand, held by Harinder Sidhu, who was born in Singapore and has an Indian background—further work is required to achieve a proportionate representation.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has placed significant emphasis on encouraging diverse perspectives in diplomacy. Over the past 50 years, DFAT’s workplace reforms have focused on addressing the systemic barriers faced by marginalised groups who have been traditionally under-represented in the agency’s male, ‘WASPy’ (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture. Today, diversity and inclusion strategies and initiatives in DFAT focus on groups including women, culturally and linguistically diverse Australians, Indigenous Australians, LGBTI Australians and Australians with disabilities.

The integration of an Indigenous perspective is one area that DFAT has made significant progress on since Labor came to power in May last year. One key step was the appointment of an ambassador for First Nations people earlier this year, who, among other roles, is providing strategic guidance on the development and implementation of a First Nations foreign policy strategy.

Gender equity, including at the leadership level, is another area of diversity that DFAT has focused on. Between 2016 and 2021, the number of women serving as heads of Australian diplomatic missions more than doubled, from 19% to 39%, and Australia’s three most recent foreign ministers have been women.

However, the dividends of such gender initiatives appear to be unevenly distributed, as highlighted by DFAT’s 2021 women in leadership strategy. The strategy notes that DFAT ‘has further to go’ in ensuring that ‘the benefits of gender equality are shared equitably’ with women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, Indigenous women, women with disabilities, and sex or gender diverse people.

The shortcomings of DFAT’s gender equity initiatives are consistent with broader findings on the impact of diversity and inclusion programs in Australian workplaces. The Diversity Council Australia recently released landmark research on culturally and racially marginalised women in leadership noting that while gender equity initiatives ‘have made great strides’, they have been criticised for having a ‘tendency to improve outcomes mainly for white, middle class, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgendered women’. The research also highlights that women of colour are often overlooked in Australian workplaces.

Discrimination is one of the many factors contributing to the under-representation of women of colour, and people of colour more generally, in professional settings. Recent research into promotion in the Australian public service supports this notion, emphasising widespread racial discrimination. One key finding was that Anglo-Australian applicants were about 60% more likely than non-Anglo-Australian applicants to receive a promotion from Executive Level 2 to Senior Executive Service positions—and DFAT is no exception.

DFAT’s report on the results of the 2022 APS employee census revealed that gender-based and race-based discrimination were two of the three most common categories of discrimination experienced by employees who had reported discrimination in the past 12 months. For women of colour, who often experience both gender- and race-based discrimination, this double disadvantage—dubbed the ‘glass–cultural ceiling’—has tended to be overlooked in workplaces.

Despite DFAT’s acknowledgement that marginalised groups, such as women of colour, are under-represented and that discrimination is an issue, a lack of data is limiting progress on diversity and inclusion initiatives. While the Australian Public Service Commission collects data on cultural diversity through the APS employment database, the information is incomplete because it is provided voluntarily and because, apart from gender, the only relevant metrics are an employee’s first language spoken and country of birth.

The Greens’ deputy leader, Mehreen Faruqi, has argued that APS data should be supplemented with disaggregated data about ethnic diversity. The APS is working with the Diversity Council Australia to ensure that the next APS survey, to be held later this year, collects more detailed data on cultural background. The next iteration of the Australian population census, to be held in 2026, will also collect ethnicity data for the first time. Once released, these two datasets should be used by the APS, including DFAT, to better understand the extent to which marginalised groups such as women of colour are under-represented. This will help them focus their efforts and improve the inclusion of women of colour in diplomacy.

In the meantime, DFAT should use proxies for cultural diversity, such as the population census’s ancestry metric, to approximate the under-representation of women of colour. The ancestry metric enables the size of ethnic groups such as Asian-Australians to be estimated. Since Asian-Australians make up 17.4% of the Australian population, that means roughly 8.7% of the population are female Asian-Australians. However, when looking at the gallery of women who have been posted abroad as ambassadors and high commissioners, we see that this cultural diversity hasn’t proportionately filtered through. The under-representation of Asian-Australian women in diplomatic leadership positions reflects the ‘bamboo ceiling’ they face.

Aside from improving data collation and analysis, existing gender equity initiatives can be used specifically to address the under-representation of marginalised women, including women of colour, in diplomacy. DFAT has committed to achieving a 40/40/20 gender balance—40% men, 40% women and 20% any gender—at division level and at posts by 2025. However, it’s vital that within those targets there’s a focus on marginalised groups such as women of colour, Indigenous women, women with disabilities and LGBTI women.

Tailored training and development programs are another important method for fostering the inclusion of women of colour in diplomacy. Even though several mentoring programs exist for women in APS leadership positions, programs that specifically acknowledge the barriers and issues faced by people of colour, including women of colour, are necessary. Such initiatives already exist in the private sector, such as Women of Colour Australia’s mentorship program and executive leadership program. The Dr John Yu fellowship, based at University of Sydney, aims to promote cultural diversity in leadership and has included participants from public-sector agencies such as DFAT.

While improving inclusion of women of colour in diplomacy requires significant time and investment, the business case for change is clear. Aside from the importance of reflecting the diversity of the wider Australian community, intercultural and multilingual skills are a clear necessity in Australia’s engagement with foreign counterparts. Leveraging the lived experience of people of colour, especially those who have a multicultural background, speak a foreign language or have lived overseas, is integral to fulfilling the Australian government’s desire to close key capability gaps in diplomacy. Enhancing Asian literacy across various areas of Australian government policymaking, including trade, national security and intelligence, is critical. One area for growth would be leveraging the skills of Chinese-speaking diaspora communities in Australia.

By building on recent progress, the government has an opportunity to step up to ensure the inclusion of women of colour in Australian diplomacy. An approach to cultural inclusivity that considers marginalised groups in DFAT’s gender equity initiatives will produce significant dividends for Australia’s foreign policy objectives.

On being Australia’s ambassador to the United States

In a chapter of a book marking the 75th anniversary of Australian representation in the US, I noted that a key challenge for any ambassador is keeping up with direct communications between ministers and principals. I wrote:

In my time, the most extensive extra-ambassadorial communicator was former prime minister Kevin Rudd. He was nonstop at all levels and branches of government. So ubiquitous was he that, when he briefly returned to office, excited individuals at the White House said they were forming the Rudd Letter Committee. That was brought into existence, they assured me previously, because it was the only way to handle the regular written communication from the Prime Minister.

His expertise on China was well regarded by Barack Obama during his time as president. Generally, I was advised, whenever Obama interacted with China via a meeting with the Chinese leadership, a call to Rudd was part of his briefing. The regard in which he was held was demonstrated to me when he was foreign minister and we visited the national security adviser in the White House. Obama dropped in on the conversation. This was not a normal event.

Many members of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy and national security team were officials in those times. Rudd knows many of them and they’ve all followed him and his very public post-government global presence. Since his appointment as Australia’s next ambassador to the US was announced, he has received plenty of advice on modifying his views and his presentation. He knows the protocols of the department he has rejoined. He must and will abide by them.

We’ve been for some time valued interlocutors on our broad region by US administrations. When I had the job, I was encouraged by the Americans to establish a regular conference at the residence with national security officials from both countries on developments in North Asia. There will be numerous opportunities for Rudd to engage with senior officials on his and the Australian government’s view of the region. These activities will take a modest portion of his time. Absorbing more time will be the granular aspects of our contemporary relationship. He is now a cog in the wheel of a representational machine that puts in place national security policy for development and implementation.

In the history of prime ministers as heads of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade missions, Rudd is only the second appointee since World War II. The other, Gough Whitlam to UNESCO, doesn’t really count. Those appointed pre–World War II, Stanley Bruce, Joseph Cook, Andrew Fisher and George Reid, were, like Rudd, assigned to help manage the relationship with our then principal military ally and our major investor. The great 19th-century British political theoretician Walter Bagehot said great prime ministers were men of commonplace opinions but uncommon administrative abilities. It’s not Rudd’s opinions that will count so much here but rather his administrative abilities.

Our Washington embassy contributes to the evolution of policy towards the US and more broadly. But where it counts is dealing with the infrastructure of policy delivery, particularly on national security. We stand in the top four of American weapons customers. The defence section of the embassy is as large as DFAT’s and greater when intelligence is added. In my time, the defence section was managing more than 400 items in the US foreign military sales program. The work isn’t handled by the ambassador, but often the contracts throw up issues that require the ambassador’s engagement. The ambassador also has a multitude of representational tasks in the DC diplomatic round, the embassies of friendly states, and the layers of organisations and local governments wishing to hear from us.

The main task for the next few years will be national security. The ambassador and embassy will be an on-the-ground tool for Australia’s government. The US administration and much of Congress have worked through their assessments of us to the point where we’ve moved from our Cold War backwater status to the geopolitical front line. That was foreshadowed in Obama’s ‘pivot’ to the Pacific. Then, China was viewed with some wariness but was seen as mainly benign, and the US hoped for a productive relationship. The focus was on the growing significance of Asia–Pacific nations in the global economy. Now the strategic issues far outweigh those calculations in driving American policy.

In Rudd’s lap will sit the task of making the AUKUS technology-sharing agreement work. Getting what we need on nuclear submarines is enormously complex and the ground under it will be constantly shifting. Many in the US are disturbed about sharing their most critical technology.

The other AUKUS pillar of collaborative high-end research will likewise tease up issues and need intense support from the embassy. Crucial will be activity associated with the development and supply of critical minerals. Every manoeuvre by the prime minister, foreign minister, defence minister and trade minister, not just in terms of relations with the US, but also in the strategic region we inhabit as the US now sees it, will have to be shadowed by the ambassador constantly looking for ways to enhance our effort and forewarn of subtle shifts in American positions.

The ambassador is also essential in guiding relations with Congress. Rudd will find himself in a better position than I was as we now have quite a substantial Australian caucus. When dealing with Congress members, you must remember that they are the most important people in the room and it’s a privilege to be with them. I was well advised to never approach a member, particularly a House member, for a ‘hail fellow, well met’ encounter. Their days are spent raising money and gathering votes. We are irrelevant. You must always have either a question or a point of substance on a matter they’re interested in if they’re to see you, let alone take you seriously.

Directly and indirectly, Congress can greatly damage our interests.

The starting point of that damage is the capacity of a fringe-controlled Republican Party to seriously undermine the economic standing of the US with the threat to repudiate debt. Then through struggles over the defence budget, though there Republicans are supportive. For AUKUS to work fully, there will need to be a legislative change in the US that heavily protects its best capabilities. We’ll need to work with that. We will have nuanced views on the Indo-Pacific strategic environment, requiring explanation in Congress.

Beyond Congress, but including Congress, will be the resources associated with the initiatives announced at the last AUSMIN talks. The very substantial build-up of American capacity to utilise our defence facilities is vital to our deterrence posture. When the US Marines’ deployment through Darwin was announced by the Obama administration, there was much behind-the-scenes disagreement on costs and capacities. This small exercise involved the embassy. A fast-tracked decision for the substantial adjustments necessary across the northern facilities and the Stirling naval base will involve substantial costs. Details are not handled by the ambassador, but any impasse reached will land on their desk, and they have a substantial watching brief.

The US now understands Australian strategic geography and is incorporating that knowledge in its mental map of the region. When we used to argue about issues like our involvement in the China-initiated Asia Infrastructure Bank, I’d point to differences in our perspectives on the Indo-Pacific. Theirs, I said, was an east–west perspective. They looked at Asia through the perspective of Confucian societies. We looked north–south. Our view ran through Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu societies to the Confucian. Our judgement in participating in the bank was informed in part by its enthusiasm for our participation. We prioritised it over US opposition. There were different purposes there, of course. Now the Americans have come to value the possibility of engaging from our strategic geographical perspective. A southern look at areas of interest to China can complicate its task.

Rudd’s challenge will be to build in the Americans a level of trust enabling him to carry our interests through the complexities that will emerge. This does not involve evolving power relationships in the Indo-Pacific. That is a matter for ministers. It’s about administration, being on top of the detail, working the best outcomes for our survival in a zone where we have decided that, given local capabilities, we have no warning time on really damaging threats. We know that is central to American willingness to share information on emerging technologies. This is particularly so with the crown jewels of American strategic capability, their nuclear submarines. The level of trust necessary here is unprecedented. Building that is the ambassador’s job.

First Nations diplomacy could be Australia’s key foreign policy tool

To maximise global influence, countries need to be sophisticated in deploying diplomatic efforts that project who they are in the world, both with existing partners and in the search for new ones.

This point seems to have been missed in some of the criticism of the Albanese government’s establishment in last month’s budget of an Office of First Nations Engagement, fulfilling an election promise.

The allocation of $2 million to set up the office within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is, in the context of the increase of $900 million to the Pacific aid budget, a rounding error.

But when it comes to getting bang for buck, the office may prove to be an inexpensive strategic asset in Australia’s foreign policy toolkit.

The relevance of the new office to vital diplomatic efforts and geopolitics more generally is perhaps not obvious, and some observers will not grasp the strategic value even of this small allocation. Granted, it is not going to help deter malicious actions by Beijing against Australia, or help us win a war in the Indo-Pacific.

What it will do is support engagement with regional and global partners who are less keen on talking only about shared threats and are more focused on exploring shared values and interests. In particular, it will help our diplomacy in the Pacific—a vital pursuit that is well worth this small investment.

Separately, it will ensure that Australians know that their foreign policy is based on our domestic interests, which range from countering terrorism and foreign interference to strengthening national resilience and trust in institutions.

Indigenous geopolitics is regionally significant. Of the 500 million indigenous people in 90 countries, 70% live in Asia. Indigenous expertise is crucial to building resilience to climate change and preserving the world’s remaining biodiversity.

Indigenous peoples have not been considered important transnational actors but, globally, they have ownership, use or management rights over more than 25% of the world’s land surface and 37% of all remaining natural lands.

Both major parties recognise the need for a combination of hard power and strategic diplomacy that includes First Nations engagement. The creation of the Indigenous Diplomacy Agenda—DFAT’s strategy on Indigenous engagement across trade, aid and foreign policy—in May 2021 under the previous government reflects the bipartisan approach.

The agenda and the new office have a clear strategic rationale.

Having a compelling story about Australia is a critical element of national power. National stories are complicated and Australia’s colonial history is replete with injustice and violence towards First Nations people. We must be able to look our international partners in the eye and make it clear that the Australia they see is the whole package—warts and all.

If we don’t, then we undermine the credibility of our national story and risk playing into the hands of others who seek to distract from their current human rights violations, as Beijing routinely does when it accuses Australia of hypocrisy for raising the grave abuses in Xinjiang.

Such a tactic is aimed at delegitimising the right of others to speak. It will be less effective towards Australia if First Nations people and our history are factored into how we present ourselves internationally.

It is also why two of our Five Eyes partners, Canada and New Zealand, have developed Indigenous foreign policy strategies, which help their regional engagement. Of course, it doesn’t mean Australia should follow all aspects of New Zealand’s foreign and defence policy, which still needs to adapt to play an effective role in the era of strategic competition, but where we can strengthen our hand, we should.

For example, the New Zealand–led Indigenous Peoples Economic and Trade Cooperation Arrangement involving Taiwan, Canada and Australia was ‘an effort to build common economic goals between Indigenous groups but also an attempt to draw Taiwan in from diplomatic isolation’.

This is logical not ideological. It is also smart to take advantage of Australia’s being uniquely placed to participate in different international groupings—from AUKUS and the Five Eyes with our traditional partners to the Quad—and with different foreign policy strategies from the ASEAN Indo-Pacific Outlook to the European Union’s Strategic Compass.

The number of overseas trips by ministers clearly shows that routine and systematic engagement with the region is part of the new government’s strategy. The best approach is being able to talk about both shared threats and opportunities.

The appearance of Pat Dodson as special envoy for reconciliation, and Chris Bowen on climate change, alongside Penny Wong in New York recently showcases key thematic planks of the government’s approach to the rules-based order. It shows that the government and Australia can address multiple challenges at once, even if the most pressing security objective is to counter Beijing’s malicious behaviour.

Australia has approached its relations with Pacific neighbours with some timidity, as it has not wanted to appear to be a neo-colonial power.

This is admirable, but has in practice meant walking on eggshells rather than dealing with reality—with the consequence that neither the threats posed by Beijing nor topics like climate and cultural links have been fully and properly discussed.

While elite capture was the cause, rather than any action of Australia’s, the recent Beijing–Honiara security agreement and the dangers it presented to the region should have been a surprise to no one.

There will be some who think that the office of First Nations foreign policy will mean that every portfolio will have to consider Indigenous issues. It may come as a surprise, but every government portfolio already has requirements under the Closing the Gap policy.

Defence, for example, has a whole-of-organisation approach to Indigenous affairs, including how to navigate negotiating land-use agreements in respectful ways in its areas of operation as well as in recruitment and retention. Among other measures, Defence aims to achieve a 5% Indigenous workforce participation target.

This is not about having our heads in the sand about the threats our nation faces. It is about recognising that we are at our strongest when we counter those threats with everything we’ve got in our arsenal, which includes both military and diplomatic power.

Forming a shared narrative with our neighbours is a way for Australia to build trust, demonstrate shared values and exercise influence. And such a shared narrative will then create increased space for raising the reality of the challenges we face from authoritarian regimes who care only about their domestic interests and not the region’s.

The next NRL team should come from Papua New Guinea

For all the focus in the Australian media on recent developments throughout the Pacific, it’s strange that the potential addition of a Papua New Guinea team to the Australian National Rugby League appears to have largely remained on the sports pages. Relatively modest government support for this proposal could provide a great win for the Australia–PNG relationship.

Rugby league is immensely popular in PNG, the only country in which it is the national sport. The code was exported to the then-territory in the 1930s and 1940s by miners and soldiers. The men’s national side, the PNG Kumuls (meaning bird of paradise in Tok Pisin) plays the Australian Prime Minister’s XIII annually. The country has also fielded a women’s international side, the Orchids, since 2017. Many thousands of fans greet even losing teams when they return to Port Moresby.

At the domestic level, the PNG Hunters play in the Queensland Rugby League, one of Australia’s second-tier competitions. The Hunters won the premiership in 2017 in that competition, and their games are very widely watched in PNG. The NRL’s State of Origin series is wildly popular there, too.

Much has been written about sports diplomacy in general and Olympic games often prompt discussion on the topic. The infamous 1936 Munich Olympics and so-called ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ are often referenced. Closer to home, Anthony Bubalo wrote some time ago on the Australian potential of ‘football diplomacy’ in Asia, where soccer is very popular.

In 2019, the government produced a strategy led by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade called Sports Diplomacy 2030. That document notes that close to half of all players in the NRL have Pacific heritage, and commits to developing ‘pathways for Pacific athletes and teams to participate in Australian and international sporting competitions’ in general terms. Accordingly, the government already provides support to sport across the Pacific through PacificAusSports—though the details of this support for specific sporting codes and initiatives are a little unclear.

This latest PNG-NRL initiative is not entirely novel. An ultimately unsuccessful bid team met NRL executives in 2010, when sponsors including Coca-Cola and PNG government ministers were backing an initiative to add a PNG franchise to the competition. As was noted at that time, ‘an indication of the hold rugby league has on the nation’s population was a recent government edict making the sport a mandatory part of the curriculum in all schools’.

In years gone by, Labor has supported the idea. Before the 2019 election, Labor made a policy commitment to investigate how to get a PNG team into the NRL. The commitment was not renewed during the recent election campaign, but political winds might have shifted at an opportune time for the new PNG bid and its backers.

The latest bid is backed by PNG Prime Minister James Marape, and proponents have apparently suggested that they are open to it having a broader Pacific bent, with potential links to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Others have suggested some kind of joint venture with north Queensland. This is a nod to the broader potential of rugby league as a link to Australia’s Pacific neighbours—the Fijian Kaiviti Silktails play in the NSW Rugby League, another second-tier competition. Backers apparently believe the PNG team could be ready to go from 2025.

The 2022 NRL salary cap was $9.4 million. Australia’s aid spend in 2021–22 totals more than $4.3 billion, and the new federal government has committed to significant increases in aid spending for the Pacific. Of course, salaries are far from the only cost associated with running a rugby league club. But if you average the NRL’s annual expenses, the competition only spends about $33 million per club in addition to individual club balance sheets.

Just a little bit of Australian government money directed towards a PNG (or Pacific) team would make a substantial difference to the commercial viability and reach of such a club.

There are of course real difficulties. Finding a sponsorship base for a PNG team would be trickier than for established NRL clubs, for example, and a team needs to be financially sustainable to have a future. There are also complicated politics within the NRL, with teams naturally protecting their existing fan bases. This is all ultimately a decision for the NRL, not the Australian government, so these considerations are not mere quibbles. Nonetheless, there is no reason to think that a way forward can’t be found.

Potential Australian government support shouldn’t be seen as purely financial. There’s a lot at stake here, and it’s important that a PNG club not simply go ahead but genuinely succeed. This means making sure the club is properly administered and that it is assisted with regulatory and immigration hurdles, for instance. Drawing on the successes and lessons of the Hunters and Silktails, both of which have received Australian government assistance, is an obvious starting point.

As this Sydney Morning Herald report on the broader implications of the PNG bid makes clear, sporting affinity is a comparative advantage Australia enjoys with our Pacific neighbours. No competitor can buttress their diplomatic relationship with PNG and the wider Pacific in the same way we can with rugby league. This might also be an unconventional opportunity for modest but consequential infrastructure investment and economic exchange with our most important neighbour.

If it isn’t already, the Australian government should seriously consider supporting the 18th NRL club—in PNG colours. This is a potential win-win we should all be celebrating.

It’s time to restore funding to Australia’s diplomacy

Australia’s diplomatic lapses in 2021 exposed our underappreciation of diplomacy and underinvestment in diplomatic capability.

Foreign policy and diplomacy are not the same. As I note in my new ASPI report, The costs of discounted diplomacy, AUKUS was a stark example of arguably good Australian foreign policy darkened by inarguably poor diplomacy. The decision to advocate for an international inquiry into the source of Covid-19 was sound policy, but to advocate unilaterally was unsound diplomacy.

Foreign policy is what states decide to do to cope with each other. Diplomacy is how they try to do what they have decided upon.

Diplomacy is hard, and even harder when you’re running out of luck.

For most of its modern history, Australia has been lucky. Our great and powerful friend—the United States—has been a global power, not one of several major powers. We haven’t had a free ride, but we’ve enjoyed a comparatively easy ride.

That friendship has also given us a privileged position in international order-building. Australia has understood the motivations, aspirations and modes of conduct of the US as it partly nurtured and partly imposed international order.

In addition, geographic good fortune and border controls have protected us from various threats, real and imagined.

Luck won’t play such a big part in Australia’s future, which will be influenced more by competing major powers, less by the US. The still substantial influence of the West on the international order will inevitably moderate. Emerging non-Western powers will insist on a bigger say.

Within the new multipolar world order, the US and China loom largest, but other nations have substantial economic, political, military and diplomatic power, or they are attaining it.

We’re likely to be safer, richer and more respected if we know how to listen to them and how to get them to listen to us, which is mainly the work of diplomats.

And border controls won’t protect us from foreign interference, trade disputes or climate change. When the luck of geography is not enough, most states turn to diplomacy.

Yet, no one should underestimate the role that deterrence, alliances and border controls will continue to play in the implementation of Australian foreign policy.

Equally, though, no one should underestimate the extent to which their prominence in Australian security thinking has pushed diplomacy into the shadows.

If governments had considered diplomacy critical to national security, for the past two decades they wouldn’t have reduced the operating budget for foreign policy and diplomatic work by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade by 9%, while massively (and sensibly) expanding the budgets for defence, intelligence and border control.

With this operating budget, DFAT decides, for example, how many people to employ and the individual budgets for posts overseas, divisions in Canberra and state offices in Australian capital cities, as well as budgets for public diplomacy, sponsored visits and training.

While cutting DFAT’s operating budget by 9%, governments increased the department’s budget for passport and consular services by 30% and its budget for physical infrastructure (property, security, ICT) by 39%.

Australia’s passport and consular services are among the best in the world because they are well resourced, and they put the safety of travelling Australians first. They are Qantas quality, and they should be kept at Qantas quality.

In contrast, Australia’s foreign policymaking and diplomacy are under-resourced, putting the security, prosperity and reputation of Australia at risk. On DFAT’s watery policy fuel, Qantas would struggle to get off the ground.

As with consular services, governments have taken seriously their responsibility to ensure that Australia’s overseas network has adequate physical infrastructure.

The issue here is the gap between the surging expenditure on infrastructure and the sagging expenditure on foreign policy and diplomacy. It rekindles memories of an episode of the British comedy Yes, Minister, in which the government has funded the construction and staffing of a hospital, but it has no patients.

DFAT’s shrinking operational budget has left many of our diplomatic posts with a permanently skeleton staff and insufficient funds to do their jobs, namely, tilt the international balance a little more in Australia’s favour.

If diplomacy is to become an integral part of national security, the government should prepare a comprehensive capability assessment for DFAT, followed by a financial plan to match capability needs.

DFAT’s budgetary problem won’t be fixed without political leadership and public support.

Securing public support is not easy. Foreign policy and diplomacy rarely impinge on the lives of most Australians, so they’re understandably indifferent to the state of DFAT’s budget.

Australians, though, support good public policy, and want it funded adequately, if they’re persuaded of its value.

That’s the job of political leaders, who are ultimately responsible for advancing the security, prosperity, reputation and self-respect of Australia.

Government focuses on strategic shaping as DFAT drops soft-power review

‘Australia’s strategic environment has deteriorated more rapidly than anticipated … Our region is in the midst of the most consequential strategic realignment since the Second World War … The Indo-Pacific is at the centre of greater strategic competition, making the region more contested and apprehensive.’

— Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, ‘Foreword’, 2020 defence strategic update

Australia’s new policy is to ‘shape’ our strategic environment.

While announced as a defence job, shaping in international affairs involves everything from military force to the power of ideas.

So it’s ironic that as Canberra embraces shaping, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has quietly dropped its review of Australia’s soft power.

In the middle of the pandemic year, Australia unveiled its thoughts on strategic shaping just as China took out a hammer and went bang. Here was a decisive bit of Beijing shaping.

On 30 June, China imposed its new security law on Hong Kong. The four major crimes—separatism, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign countries—are ambiguously worded with devastating effect. China reshaped Hong Kong’s future with brutal finality, casting aside much Beijing once agreed to maintain.

The Chinese flag went up in Hong Kong at midnight on 30 June, 1997; the Chinese hammer came down on 30 June 2020. The new law meant that one country, two systems, became one country, one system: the end of Hong Kong as we’ve known it.

China gave dramatic point to Australia’s discussion of how things are shaping (or losing shape).

The following day, 1 July, Australia’s defence strategic update was issued. The update is short and sharp, at only 61 pages. And explicit. If this is the public version, imagine the darkness in the longer, secret version.

The update frets at friction and strain and disruption and challenge in the global order. Economic or strategic goals are achieved by coercion. The risk of state-on-state conflict rises.

Defence was rough on sacred cows. The update ditched 50 years of strategic theology: Australia no longer believes it has 10 years’ warning of a conventional conflict, based on the time it’d take an adversary to prepare and mobilise for war.

Another ‘essential element’ squeezed was the superiority of the Australian Defence Force in the region. The 2016 defence white paper had traditional words about ‘maintaining the ADF’s technology and capability superiority over potential adversaries’. Four years on, that comforting ‘superiority’ has ebbed. All the update gives is an edge: ‘Military modernisation in the Indo-Pacific has accelerated faster than envisaged. Regional force modernisation has resulted in the development and deployment of new weapons that challenge Australia’s military capability edge.’

In its opening pages—with a foreword from the prime minister and defence minister, an executive summary and a chapter on Australia’s strategic environment—the update is a foreign policy statement as much as a defence document.

To read those first 20 pages as foreign policy is more than merely accepting the critics’ line that Oz policy has been seized by the Department of Defence and the security agencies. Here is how Australia sees its world.

Certainly, it’s true that Defence introduced Canberra to its new geographic construct: the Indo-Pacific. In the 2013 defence white paper, the Indo-Pacific replaced the Asia–Pacific to broaden the frame of reference and factor in India. Defence trumped the liberal-internationalist flavour of the ‘Asian century’.

The ‘new framework’ in the 2020 update says Australia wants (emphasis not added) ‘to deploy military power to shape Australia’s strategic environment, deter actions against our interests and, when required, respond with credible military force’.

Deterring and responding are mostly military missions, but shaping needs more than the military.

Shaping describes what we can attempt, indicating caution about what we can define, demand or deliver in this ‘contested and apprehensive’ time.

As shaping has its gaze firmly fixed on power, it’s surprising Canberra is narrowing how it conceptualises it.

In the shaping power contest, our diplomats have been told not to bother being too ambitious. The pandemic is changing the game too quickly for DFAT to bother pondering ‘soft power’. No bandwidth is available for fresh thoughts about influencing the behaviour of others through the power of attraction and ideas.

The review of Australia’s soft power has been shut down. The soft-power death notice issued by DFAT reads:

Following the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Government concluded that we should not continue with a review process that was no longer as relevant to the significantly changed global environment. The Review was discontinued in October 2020.

Pursuing Australia’s interests during the COVID-19 response, the economic recovery and as we enter a post-COVID era will required a focused, deliberate effort integrating all tools of statecraft, including Australia’s considerable soft power.

The review had been in the works for two years, starting in August 2018. Much of the writing had been done and the dollars debated.

The review was promised by DFAT’s 2017 foreign policy white paper. That document has only eight chapters, with its concluding chapter devoted to how Australia’s soft power amplifies our international influence.

Things die in Canberra’s jungle for many reasons: lack of political champions, the idea doesn’t win, the dollars go elsewhere. Soft power was too tied to the prime minister and foreign minister who issued the foreign policy white paper, Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop.

The unwillingness or inability to conceptualise and grow soft power emphasises earlier failures: the way we trashed and burned and discarded one of our key foreign policy instruments, our international media voice.

In the 1990s, Australia had a TV news presence in East Asia that competed with CNN and the BBC. Today that’s gone.

Until the last decade, Australia was the pre-eminent international media voice in the South Pacific, as we had been since World War II. Today we’ve lost that singular role. New Zealand, for the first time, might just be ahead of us, and China is everywhere.

Hard news and free media used to be the sharp edge of Australian soft power. No more.

In these troubled times—whether new cold war or new hot peace—Canberra has a narrow understanding of the tools available for the great shaping mission.

Fifty years of Foreign Affairs: the scrooge effect

Australia heads towards a dismal achievement: halving what it spends on diplomacy in only three decades.

The Joe Biden rule (‘Show me your budget, and I will tell you what you value’) says Australia has consistently undervalued diplomacy.

Here’s the halving calculation from Tania Miletic and John Langmore:

Australian diplomacy has had a low priority throughout the last quarter century. The proportion of total Commonwealth expenditure allocated to diplomacy fell from 0.38 percent in 1995–96 to 0.22 percent in 2018–19, a decline of 42 percent. The budget announced on 6 October 2020 included forward estimates for diplomacy which will reduce their share of Commonwealth outlays even further to 0.18 percent in 2023–24. This means that by 2023–24, Australian outlays on diplomacy will have been cut by 53 percent during the previous 28 years.

Halving the proportion of spending on diplomacy at a time of rising tension is shockingly irresponsible and ensures Australia’s diplomatic service is so inadequately funded and staffed that it cannot be fully effective.

The ‘scrooge-like’ approach to diplomacy hurts our national interests, as Ben Oquist notes. Yet Canberra has been doing the scrooge for so long, he writes, revamping ‘Australia’s diplomatic architecture will require more than money; a shift in the cultural and political status we accord diplomacy is needed too’.

The scrooge effect describes significant structural forces acting on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. In engineering, structural forces cause compression, tension, shear, bending and torsion; DFAT knows most of those.

The previous column described six forces pressing on DFAT, but focused only on the top of the list: the evolution and empowerment of Australia’s presidential prime minister. Turn now to the other forces doing the scrooge on DFAT:

  • the birth of ministerial minders
  • public service managerialism
  • globalisation and the digital era
  • Canberra’s national security system and mindset
  • political choices and an ambivalent view of DFAT fed by ideological hostility.

Bureaucratic/public service managerialism and the new political class, the ministerial minders, started slowly in the 1970s, blossomed in the 1980s, and have been powering on ever since.

The minder mentality reaches deep into every department in Canberra. Minders are essential to make the system work, but they’ve certainly changed the system. Minders reside in Parliament House, mostly in the executive wing at the rear of the building, serving their ministers and steering a course by the four points of the parliamentary compass: power, policy, politics and personalities.

Managerialism treats the public service like a business while seeking ever-stricter political control over bureaucrats; the disciplinary talisman is the public service ‘efficiency dividend’ used to squeeze departmental expenses and staff numbers.

The jargon of managerialism is to make the public service sharper, more responsive, nimbler, more productive … and … about here the eyes start to glaze over. The ‘efficient and effective’ language (placed on par with the need to be ‘apolitical’) was at the heart of the Public Service Act 1999, which transformed the service by sweeping away the complex structure that’d evolved on the 1922 public service law.

A key objective unites minderism and managerialism: the need for control. The combination has had one particular effect in foreign affairs: curbing the power and prerogatives of ambassadors. Once, ambassadors on post presided and often ruled. No more.

In a piece on the culture of DFAT in 2004, I wrote that self-censorship had become an ambassadorial artform; well-understood protocols ensured ministers were not told what they didn’t want to hear and professional discipline in the department was reinforced by a ‘culture of compliance’.

It’s hard to be creative and dynamic when ministers and minders demand ‘no surprises’, discipline and compliance. A succession of DFAT secretaries—Dennis Richardson, Peter Varghese and Frances Adamson—have talked the talk about the department stepping up to its role as a great maker of policy. Trouble is, much of Canberra prefers to treat DFAT as a service provider rather than a policy department.

Globalisation and the digital era mean every part of the bureaucracy has some international concerns. Just as most Australians now run their own communications and media strategies (aka their smartphones), most departments in Canberra run some version of foreign policy. That’s why 30 Commonwealth agencies have staff in overseas posts.

The growth of the national security frame as the driver of international policy is a core Canberra story of the 21st century.

DFAT’s traditional friend–foe, Defence, has become part of a much bigger national security apparatus. The attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 and the Bali bombings of 12 October 2002 were seminal launch dates for Canberra’s national security machinery.

The power and purse of national security has waxed as DFAT waned.

The former senior diplomat and ambassador to China Geoff Raby argues that foreign policy has been ‘weaponised’ as the ‘intelligence, security and military establishment has taken control of Australia’s foreign policy towards China’.

For a pyrotechnic version of this debate, see the attack on ‘national security cowboys’ by Richardson (former head of Defence as well as DFAT) and the return rocket fire by ASPI’s Peter Jennings, calling for ‘more cowboy and less kow-tow’.

Politics always matters, and there’s an important Liberal Party dimension to what ails DFAT. The trek to halving spending on diplomacy, described by Miletic and Langmore, begins in 1996, the year John Howard came to power. Since then, the Liberals have been in power 75% of the time.

The Liberal choice has been clear: national security spending, not diplomacy. The liberal internationalist wing of the party has some affection for DFAT. But the party’s centre and right view the department as irredeemably leftish, with a world view rather than an Australian view. Such scorn flavoured Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s 2019 speech decrying ‘negative globalism’ and ‘unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy’.

Even when the Labor Party was in power—the six years under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard—the new money went to international development, not diplomacy. If the Liberal–Labor ‘golden consensus on aid’ had survived, Australia would today be an aid superpower, spending nearly $10 billion on aid, not $4 billion. The golden consensus, however, cracked on both sides of politics.

Gillard preferred budget repair to the march to the Millennium Development Goals. And Rudd records a moment of private candour in 2010 from the Liberal leader, Tony Abbott: ‘Kevin, you’ve got to agree this level of aid is just bullshit.’

Abbott acted on that sentiment when he won power in 2013, killing off AusAID as an independent executive agency reporting to the foreign minister and slashing aid. Merging AusAID into DFAT was the biggest organisational change for the department since the marriage with Trade in 1987. The Trade merger had high policy ambitions; the AusAID merger was an expression of political disdain, dismissing aid as ‘burdensome boutique business’ rather than a foreign policy priority.

The Liberal Party’s doubts about DFAT come under two broad headings: claims of political bias and doubts about its competence.

On the diplomats’ lefty bias, here’s former ambassador Mark Higgie, who had five diplomatic postings and served as an adviser to Tony Abbott:

To any Canberra insider, espec­ially those in Coalition circles, the fact most of our diplomats are leftish is a given … The spirit of Gough Whitlam continues to hover over DFAT’s R.G. Casey Building in Canberra. Most of our diplomats dream of an Australia less aligned with the US and have an often unqualified enthusiasm for the UN.

This caricature of Oz diplomats says more about the hang-ups and prejudices of the Liberal Party than it does about DFAT. The Higgie description of Oz diplomats as left-leaning bureaucratic fops got a comprehensive rebuttal from one of the best diplomats of his generation, John McCarthy:

Most officers just want sensible workable policies and to get on with the job. They accept politics as a fact of life, not as the force driving them. That force is the national interest. A few are lefties. Some are conservative. Most are in the middle somewhere. Five I know in the past couple of decades became secretaries of defence. Many at the top of the intelligence community—not the soft side of politics—spent their early careers in DFAT.

The more significant fight is over DFAT’s competence, especially within the Canberra system.

Dave Sharma, a former ambassador who’s now a Liberal MP, says his old department needs more resources but to win them it must become more focused. The reason Australia has one of the smallest diplomatic services, with the one of the smallest diplomatic footprints, in the G20? The fault, Sharma writes, lies with the department itself:

In significant part, this has been down to a failure of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the Canberra bureaucratic struggle for budget and resources. It has failed to sell its value to the political class, to cultivate champions within the cabinet, or position itself with solutions to the government’s challenges.

Sharma says Defence, Home Affairs and intelligence agencies have been better at presenting solutions to government and their budgets have grown accordingly: ‘Other than its own portfolio ministers, DFAT does not have many champions around the cabinet table—and this is because, aside from a few high-profile ambassadors, it fails to do the retail politicking necessary to sell its worth in Canberra.’

The 50-year journey since Foreign Affairs cast off its External Affairs identity has seen the creation of a great department of state that suffers the bureaucratic version of an anaemia problem.

DFAT has an admirable—often outstanding—record in navigating the rapids of international diplomacy; it’s the friends and foes and political masters in Canberra that truly control how great it can be.

Fifty years of Foreign Affairs: friends and foes in Canberra

Nobody wants to pay for good foreign policy, but everybody pays for bad foreign policy.

Join that truth to a reality that rules the public service tribes of Canberra: your foes must also be your friends.

The friend–foe fact is formed by a fundamental force of politics and bureaucracy. In Canberra, as in any capital, a dollar can be spent only once. The opportunity-cost law means the government—every day in every way—must choose. What do we really want to pay for? Power and policy push and pull the purse.

While everybody would prefer good foreign policy, they often choose to buy something else. That explains many of the travails of the 50-year journey since November 1970, when External Affairs took on the name Foreign Affairs to serve the new Australia that was emerging for a new era.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has grown into a great department with an anaemia problem. The anaemia issues are all about Canberra, as the Lowy Institute noted in its 2011 ‘diplomatic disrepair’ study:

DFAT lacks a vocal constituency and has few friends inside Cabinet. DFAT is good at persuading other governments to do things but hopeless at persuading its own government to give it anything like the resources it needs. It needs to employ in Australia some of the skills it uses overseas to knit together coalitions in support of interests.

Sympathy, please, for the pressures DFAT faces in creating Canberra constituency coalitions. The structural forces growing and pressing against the department over those 50 years are formidable.

Tectonic shifts have remade Canberra’s political and bureaucratic mountains, aided by all that has changed in the world beyond Australia:

  • the evolution and empowerment of Australia’s presidential prime minister
  • the birth of ministerial minders
  • public service managerialism
  • Canberra’s national security system—and mindset—in the 21st century
  • globalisation and the digital era: every government department has its own bit of foreign policy
  • political choices: Australia’s two parties of government—the Liberals and Labor—often buy something other than good foreign policy. Plus, important bits of the Liberal Party have an ambivalent view of DFAT fed by ideological hostility.

Top of the list is the evolution of Australia’s ‘presidential’ prime minister, a process of growth and empowerment that’s also about 50 years old. The life of Foreign Affairs has run in parallel with prime ministers becoming presidential, causing profound changes in the department’s ambit and ambitions.

The presidential graft onto Oz politics has many domestic dimensions, but it’s especially strong in the way Australia now does international relations.

Australia’s first modern foreign policy president was Gough Whitlam. To do it himself, Whitlam also served as foreign minister for the first year of his prime ministership (5 December 1972 – 6 November 1973).

When Malcolm Fraser took over as PM in 1975, the international division of the PM’s department was a gentle, small place that worried about the Commonwealth and acted as a post office. Fraser started to build muscle and money by creating the peak intelligence body, the Office of National Assessments, now the Office of National Intelligence.

The bulking and broadening reached a significant peak with John Howard’s creation of the national security committee (NSC) of cabinet in 1996, the same year DFAT moved into its specially built HQ, the R.G. Casey building.

Symbolism and power were moving in different directions. The Casey building expresses DFAT’s place as a great department of state; the NSC points to how money, influence and importance headed elsewhere.

With cabinet’s budget razor gang (the expenditure review committee) the NSC is at the centre of government—so foreign policy still has a seat at the big table. The prime minister chairs the NSC, while the secretary of the PM’s department chairs the secretaries’ committee on national security.

Writing in 2012 about the impact of presidential foreign policy, Michael Wesley commented that the PM’s department exercised ‘much greater influence on the policy-making system, injecting perspectives and preferences, convening and shaping broad policy frameworks, and closely controlling the pace of policy development and ministerial advice’.

Extra presidential steroids went into Canberra’s water in the move from the old to the new parliament building in 1988. In the cramped old parliament, there was no room for a big presidential court. The lines from small ministerial offices to Canberra departments were short and tight. The bureaucracy had a stronger grip than exists today.

Moving into the new parliament allowed the creation of an executive wing at the rear of the building—the Canberra version of the White House West Wing.

DFAT now has long experience of serving a presidential PM. When relations between the prime minister and foreign minister are good, the system can deliver strong results.

Other elements of Canberra’s tectonic shifts, though, have clearly sapped rather than served Foreign Affairs. To be continued …